Give Arab High School students back privileges on their Chromebooks.

This school year Arab High School introduced Chromebooks into the curriculum, from IPads in the previous years. Although it has been a slight challenge to adapt to the changes, Chromebooks have been an improvement to learning in the classrooms.

The issue lies in the restrictions that the school has placed on features on Chromebooks. They have limited almost all settings to be administrator regulated. When the Chromebooks pushed out an update the school attached these limitations to the update, which included but are not limited to: not being able to change the wallpaper, not being able to add other Google accounts, not being able to access entertainment based websites, use google hangouts, limited searches on search engines, and even small settings fixes that would make Chromebooks more enjoyable for students.

Personally, the aspect of backgrounds shouldn't be as big of a deal as it is, but that gives each student their own personal touch on their Chromebooks. Netflix is blocked, but during exam week, students are trying to go through more malicious websites to watch movies in their downtime, which is already a hassle and extremely unsafe for the computer. The students are also limited on search engines where certain words and phrases are deemed inappropriate by the administrators. I do understand some of these words that students are restricting from searching, but there are times in which students are required to do research in class for projects and papers, but due to the restrictions on the search engines, students are not able to search some of these topics that they are required to research. I, along with other students, like to keep calendars synced up and up to date, and to keep up with friends throughout the day by using the chat feature on google hangouts. Friends would warn me about assignments for class, remind each other of the assignment due next class, or even just send a message to check up on my friends on their school day. Some of these restrictions are understandable and even necessary during school hours, but I do not understand why these restrictions are still active while students are at home.

While I understand the feel for the need of restrictions on school-owned devices rented by students, these Chromebooks are nevertheless rented by students. All students are punished for the inevitable mistake of the class clowns and bad kids in general who want to do unjust things on them, so I see why the school system would want to restrict these things for students, but why should all kids, including those who have never had any record of doing inappropriate or wrongful acts, be punished? While having the iPads students who were searching and/or watching inappropriate content on their computers had their iPads "wiped"-which basically meant that their device was strictly restricted and only allowed certain apps and textbooks for educational use only-punishing only those who were using their devices for inappropriate use.

This petition is to get Arab High School to open up the settings options to students until they mess up and get their privileges revoked on only their Chromebook.